When Jorge Luis Borges was dying in Geneva in 1986, a friend committed an elegant Freudian act of homage. He mentioned Borges’s book of poems The Golden Coin and was instantly corrected: The Iron Coin. The friend was embarrassed but Borges reassured him: ‘Don’t worry. You did what alchemy was unable to do.’ The remark perfectly catches Borges’s quickness, grace, learning and love of precision. It has a touch of self-deprecation too. It wasn’t as if he didn’t like the word ‘gold’ – a 1972 volume of verse is called The Gold of the Tigers – or as if he hadn’t tried plenty of verbal alchemy of his own. But a long attempt is quite different from an instantaneous, unintentional success.

We are often told that Borges, world famous for his eerie prose fictions, saw himself primarily as a poet, and regarded the short story as ‘a minor, less rigorous form’. It’s worth pausing over this preference, especially in the light of a possibly failed career in alchemy. We can distinguish between what a person does well (does incomparably) and what he or she likes to do; and between achievement and self-perception. We don’t need hard lines of division, of course, and readers’ tastes will differ. With any luck the two sets of perspectives will meet quite frequently. But Borges’s work, once you look at enough of it, does suggest a need to keep both sets in mind.

This need dawns pretty quickly on the reader of Borges’s collected sonnets, and even creeps up in the course of Stephen Kessler’s introduction to the volume. Here we learn first that Borges the poet is ‘quite a different writer from the one we thought we knew’; then that he is ‘earnest’ in his poems and ‘less ironic’ than in his fiction; that he is ‘a deeply conservative poet whose voice, even in Spanish, often sounds more British than Latin American’; and finally that he writes in a ‘stately old-world register’ because ‘unlike his contemporaries Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo … Borges in his poetry … has little interest in “making it new”.’ This story gets sadder with every assertion. Admirers of Borges’s fictions will expect to be delighted to meet almost any version of him. But this one, an Argentine wit who has decided to sound like a Victorian without irony, is not only not the Borges we think we know, he is a retraction of everything the Borges we think we know represents.

The reality of the poems is not as dire as this, but the earnestness is plentifully present. Borges wrote 140 sonnets – close to Shakespeare’s 154 – and 79 of them appear in Kessler’s volume in new English translations. The themes are largely conventional – death, time, memory, loss – and there are reflections on ancestry, old Argentinian wars, Oedipus, Dürer, the uselessness of writing (‘In verse like this,/I must create my insipid universe’), the superiority of writing over action (‘the elegy outlasts the battle’). Many, perhaps most of the poems have the air of elegant exercises rather than any strenuous engagement with an emotion or the chances of language. In the sonnets as in his other poems Borges has an uncontrollable addiction to adjectives: slow love, dispersed colours, complex melody, curious life, elemental red and delicate destiny in the first six lines of a single poem; the incessant sea, the serene morning, the infinite sand in the last two lines of another. Elsewhere we have meticulous rain, curious colour, lost suburbs, contrary fate, incalculable labyrinth, ashen hope, terrible beauty, propitious fate, infinite sand again, vain libraries and vain lecterns. I wouldn’t include in this list the deliberately baroque effects of ‘vast and vague and necessary death’ or ‘this unknown/and anxious and brief thing that is life’; and I wouldn’t exclude an element of parody from some of the other instances. Nevertheless, there is a dispiriting reliance on mere description, as if much of the hard work in the poems had been given over to the laziest members of the verbal team.

Something similar could be said about rhyme, which is more frequent in Romance languages than in English and therefore less noticeable or troublesome in a poem, but still looks lame when it is lame. As in the manifest plug represented by the number nine in the following lines:

So Plotinusteaches us in his books, which are nine.It may be that our brief lifeis the fleeting reflection of the divine.

Or in the following lamentable lines, which sound like an authentic invitation to return to the economy (and the poetry) of prose:

En un confín del vasto Sur persisteesa alta cosa, vagamente triste.

Edith Grossman’s (also faithful) translation makes a brave attempt to get at the double meaning of alta, ‘high’:

In a corner of the vast South there persistsThat noble thing, a high thing, vaguely sad.

Vaguely sad indeed.

There is a curious discussion of just this aspect of rhyme in Adolfo Bioy Casares’s immense Borges, a diary of the two writers’ long friendship. I have this book in front of me and I have done a few lifting exercises by carrying it around the house, but I mustn’t pretend I have read it. I have read in it. And some of it is not there to be read, only registered, like the infinitely repeated phrase, ‘Borges dines with us at home’ – ‘Come en casa Borges.’ Sometimes this phrase is the only entry for a day. And it can appear as often as four or five times on a single page.

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Letters

In his review of my edition of The Sonnets and Efraín Kristal’s edition of Poems of the Night by Borges, Michael Wood claims that Borges’s more classical prosody in his verse is a ‘retraction’ of his experiments in prose, thus oddly suggesting that an author’s more expansive range somehow diminishes his creative accomplishment (LRB, 8 July). Wood is entitled to his opinion; he is not, however, entitled to quote from a translation under review in a version he has ‘slightly modified’. The translation of a poem is an independent work of art created by the translator, not a transcription. Wood’s ‘modified’ citations do not serve as a direct critique of the translations – a legitimate reason to offer alternate readings – but seem to be small attempts to improve on otherwise acceptable versions. Such tampering with a published text is tantamount to altering any other text under review as a way of ‘correcting’ what the author has actually written. This not only violates critical ethics – ironic in light of a book Wood himself co-edited on the ethics of translation – but displays a rather serious misunderstanding of what a translator does. If Wood wants to translate poetry, let him try, but to ‘slightly’ vandalise what others have done is not a good way to begin.

Stephen Kessler
Santa Cruz, California

Michael Wood writes: Stephen Kessler’s point about quoting texts verbatim is a good one and I can see why he doesn’t like being ‘slightly modified’. But the accepted convention of reverting briefly to an original syntax or diction in order to allow the reader to see something that is otherwise occluded can be helpful. As for the notion that every translation (or indeed every poem) is a work of art, Mr Kessler is just kinder than I am.

Michael Wood has an exalted view of Bioy Casares (LRB, 8 July). The stories Casares wrote with Borges (though in fact written mostly by Borges) are so inferior to Borges’s own that no one would ever pay them any attention were they not associated with Borges’s name. The anthologies they compiled, the classics they annotated, the series they edited, the screenplays they wrote (and the translations they made, one could add) were mostly the work of Borges. Like the ladies who collaborated with him on many another occasion, and whose names decorate the cover of many a Borges book, Bioy, we can be certain, was acting almost entirely as an amanuensis. I have read the 1600-odd pages of Bioy’s exchanges with Borges, and I can assure Wood that in the ‘(rather cruel) literary conversations’ they had ‘most of the days of their lives’, the ‘extremely witty’ bits come entirely from Borges’s mouth. In all likelihood, before Bioy recorded them, they were less cruel and more witty. As for Wood’s assertion that Bioy was a remarkable novelist, well … de gustibus non est disputandum.

Daniel Waissbein
Lucca, Italy

Michael Wood is correct in spotting the unlikely affinity between a late poem by Borges and the works of Neruda and Vallejo. Perhaps there is a clue to the source of this affinity in Borges’s line, ‘cuando el polvo sea el polvo’, a clear echo of Francisco de Quevedo’s poem ‘Amor constante más allá de la muerte’, whose last line is ‘Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado’ (‘Dust they will be, but dust that is in love’). Quevedo, despite or maybe because of his relentless bad mood and tendency to settle scores in poems, was an important writer for many 20th-century Latin American ‘social’ poets, Neruda not least, and Quevedian pessimism is nearly impossible to avoid in Vallejo’s early work. Joining the dots to Ben Ehrenreich’s piece about El Salvador (LRB, 24 June), perhaps the most famous poem by Roque Dalton, ‘Después de la bomba atómica’ (‘After the A-Bomb’), simply adds question marks to Quevedo’s line: ‘Polvo serán, mas, ¿polvo enamorado?’